The below was written a dozen years ago, definitely in a crunch (I remember being among the first to receive a review copy of that DVD and wanting to scoop other sites) and, consequently, probably in a crabby mood. New reviews of John Carpenter movies, particularly the early ones, tend to read like fetishism as opposed to criticism. Indeed, over the years, Carpenter's aesthetics have become a shorthand for cool, such that some modern horror filmmakers seem to believe that by co-opting them they'll gain instant credibility. Still, I think I resisted the pleasures of Escape from New York a little too vehemently--this must be the most negative 3.5-star review I've ever written. Yes, that rape scene, or would-be rape scene, is troublesome, but for Snake to intervene would've been even more offensive, because it would mean the situation was cynically contrived to give him a moment of glory. Snake's heroism isn't pandering, and while his laconic machismo fits a certain Eastwood mold, he finally emerges as more of a countercultural badass who uses his carte blanche audience with the President to ask him the kind of impertinent rhetorical question one wants to say to every bureaucrat valued more than the soldiers doing his bidding: "We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. I just wondered how you felt about it." The President's ineffectual condolences, phrased as boilerplate and expressed with squirm-inducing hesitation as he mentally scans for a lifeline (then and there, Donald Pleasence exonerates his miscasting), justify Snake's final act in a way that makes me regret ascribing the "moral evasion" of The Thing--say what?--to this picture as well. Carpenter isn't ducking anything here: Snake sees that this world is rotten from the head down and so he lights the proverbial fuse. God bless him, he's an asshole. (But not a dick.)

by Bill Chambers The Farrelly Brothers' Dumb and Dumber To opens with Jim Carrey's Lloyd Christmas emerging from twenty years of catatonia. As the trailers were eager to give away, he's just been playing an elaborate hoax on best friend Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), but still: point taken. To put things in perspective, more time elapsed between Dumb and Dumber and its sequel than did between The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III, and the popular form--along with the popular taste in--movie comedy has changed significantly in the interim. This is the Rip Van Winkle of franchises, squarely un-hip no matter how evergreen is its scatological humour; the filmmakers, ultimately to their credit, value tonal continuity with Dumb & Dumber over blending in. With a plot revolving around a McGuffin that felt rickety when the first one did it in 1994, the picture embraces the quaint charms of the old school to ironically novel effect.

July 8, 2013

by Walter ChawProof
of Life is essentially a re-telling of Someone
to Watch Over Me with some bits of Missing in Action,
Papillon, Casablanca,
and Bridge on the River Kwai tacked on witlessly
and serving as a faint excuse for Russell Crowe to slap on fatigues and
crank up the virility from "high" to "stud bull." For all of Crowe's
smouldering presence and incendiary
gaze, however, there
is remarkably little chemistry between he and his infamous on-set
flame, Meg Ryan. Whether this sterility is a result of a script that
relies on cliché and unlikely "meet cute" scenarios, or a result of Meg
Ryan's overreliance on trick two of her two-trick bag, I'm not
certain. I'm content to call it an unfortunate combination of both.

by Angelo Muredda A man does a stomach crunch in mid-air,
suspended off the armpit of a muscleman logo that's spray-painted onto the side
of a gym. Is there a more quintessential Michael Bay image than the opening
shot of Pain
& Gain? The only serious contender comes later on,
in a slow-motion tableau of the same bro, Mark Wahlberg's personal
trainer-cum-murderer Danny Lugo, sailing over the windshield of an SUV,
propelled by the debris from a flying fruit stand. When your story doesn't have
any Autobots, I guess you just have to improvise with your surroundings to get
all your primary colours in. To say that the radioactive pop palette and
abs-fetishism is familiar is an understatement, but it's the thematic material
and belaboured telling of it that makes Pain & Gain a perfect storm of Bay. Temporarily
freed from the restraints of a battling-robot franchise, he's allowed to make
his most purely ideological statement yet in the form of a (fact-based) story
about three idiots pursuing their warped vision of the Horatio Alger myth--which happily coincidences with Bay's.

by
Walter Chaw "True
Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant
and Bill
have already so eloquently pointed
out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap--the sort of shallow,
handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung
up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon
Crest". White-collar smut
that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the
super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than
showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet
Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality--and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings--to the
vampire mythos, it does
well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so
continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its
vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the
appropriate
supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest
that gays
present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood
contagion?
Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly?
At least
it's not "The Walking Dead".

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock's
original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent
(Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it's Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who's privy to his last words.
They're dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass
cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on
holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day
and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man's
last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of
Hitchcock undermining Stewart's status as everyone's favourite Yank. 1934's The Man
Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock's British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes,
images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a
champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur
everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot
point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch's collaborations with Tippi
Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the
moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a
deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I'm surprised Hitch never came back
to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The
Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your
head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but
it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror
genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover,
it isn't a cheat--this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan"
craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and
screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking
to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of
the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their
reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a
little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure
is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather
reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in
horror films both good (The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See
No Evil).

by Walter Chaw I'm
no nineteenth-century cop, but I personally would begin by interrogating the guillotine-pendulum maker. James McTeigue's abominable The Raven posits
legendary Marylander Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a crazed, alcoholic, frustrated-artist type who has a bar tab the length of his arm to go with a fiery temper
and a quite-requited, it turns out, affair with toothy Emily (from Aardman Studios: Alice Eve), daughter of Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson).
Alack-alay, what should happen but a wax museum breaks out as a critics-hating
serial killer (just like Theatre of Blood, which I should've revisited instead) enacts scenes from Poe's stories whilst
dressed in the hat and cape of McTeigue's V for Vendetta protag. Good copper
Det. Fields (Luke Evans) is hot on the miscreant's trail, enlisting Poe as a
Poe expert to try to get one step ahead of the well-read marauder. There is,
alas, no ratiocination the equal of the mystery of Ben Livingston and Hannah
Shakespeare's (no relation, I hope) bewilderingly bad screenplay. No one, no
one, could deliver these lines--a mush of anachronistic phrases and
"period" posh--with conviction, much less the miscast Cusack and a motley
band of supporting players. The good news is that The Raven is funny. The bad news
is that it's so awful, it makes you the kind of person who watches a
movie just to be superior to it.

by Vincent Suarez You know the feeling: too many movies, too little time. You walk down the corridor of your local multiplex, relishing the titles on the marquees and posters, and you know that many will unfortunately have to be seen on home video. If you're lucky, you'll make wise choices, but, occasionally, your home viewing includes that film you regret not seeing theatrically. For me, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (hereafter Nightmare) is one of those films. Having grown weary of Burton's quirkiness after the disappointing Batman Returns, I passed up Nightmare in favour of movies I now cannot recall; what a shame. Fortunately, Touchstone's optical disc presentations of this magnificent film (the previous LaserDiscs and last year's DVD release) provide more than a glimpse of what was surely a wonderful theatrical experience.

June 22, 2012

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1974**½/****starring Andrew Garfield, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Rebecca Hallscreenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Seventy-Four David Peacedirected by Julian Jarrold

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1980***/****starring Paddy Considine, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Sean Harrisscreenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty David Peacedirected by James Marsh

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1983**/****starring Mark Addy, David Morrissey, Jim Carter, Warren Clarkescreenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty-Three David Peacedirected by Anand Tucker

by Bryant FrazerRed Riding, adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni into three movies from four novels by David Peace, is an awfully downbeat thing that's difficult to classify. It's not really a mystery, because the central crimes are barely the point (at least in the first two films), and the question isn't whodunit, but who among all those involved is not yet corrupt. It's not a police procedural, because the only effective police work we see is of the thuggish, back-room variety. In its specificity of time and place--nine years in Yorkshire, a county in northern England--it recalls James Ellroy's novels about Los Angeles cops in the 1940s and '50s. But Ellroy's stories were bracing because their point of view came from inside a department dominated by bigotry and machismo and tormented by its own failings. Each of the Red Riding stories comes at the situation mostly from an outsider's perspective, elevating a principled crusader to the high ground, then having the corrupt institution take potshots at him, decimating his footing.

by Bill Chambers If you don't think Kevin Kline in drag is funny, wait 'til you see Will Smith in drag--it's even less funny. By the time Jim West (Smith) had disguised himself as a belly dancer to retrieve his captured comrade Artemus Gordon (Kline) from the clutches of evil Dr. Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), I was unequivocally bored with Wild Wild West, the new summer action-comedy from Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld. Is the Old West really a breeding ground for slapstick, anyway? If your answer is yes, you're probably thinking of Blazing Saddles, but Blazing Saddles was a parody of the western genre that also satirized the social climate of 1974, not a nineteenth-century romp in and of itself.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I wasn't that upset about the bad reputation I Know Who Killed Me had acquired until I saw Roland Joffe's Captivity. I Know Who Killed Me recently took home Worst Actress and Worst Picture Razzie awards and at one point was listed on WIKIPEDIA as "one of the worst films ever made." Captivity, meanwhile, despite the not-insignificant controversy surrounding a disastrous billboard campaign and a scathing editorial by Joss Whedon condemning it sight-unseen, has all but vanished into obscurity. I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. Poor Lindsay Lohan (I'm sorry, but her pathetic Marilyn Monroe spread in the current issue of NEW YORK gets my sympathy sensors buzzing) is a staple of the tabloid industry and an easy target for hipster schadenfreude. I Know Who Killed Me has the trappings of a serious thriller and requires Lohan to do a little bit of stretching while playing off her off-screen persona. Captivity, on the other hand, is considerably less ambitious and considerably more exploitive, and as such, actress Elisha Cuthbert's participation can be dismissed as just another former TV star paying her dues in the horror genre.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Mark L. Lester's Commando as a young boy and even then I was rather surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger's eponymous hero, John Matrix, didn't get together with his reluctant sidekick, Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). She's set up to be the love interest, but the filmmakers never pull the trigger. I was similarly baffled by the saccharine relationship between Matrix and his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). In my youthful naivety, I frankly thought this was too hokey for an R-rated movie, i.e., a movie intended for grown-ups. What audience of adults would buy into this? And I couldn't believe that the film would be about her kidnapping and Matrix tracking down and rescuing her. It's just the hero invading the castle and saving the damsel-in-distress? Hell, Star Wars wasn't that basic. There had to be some socio-political nuance to the situation I simply wasn't old enough to grasp.